Garcia voice mail played in murder trial
Shortly after two people were shot and killed and another was wounded on Valentine’s Day outside Lakeside Memorial Hospital in Brockport, Frank Garcia called his nursing professor at Nazareth College and left a voice-mail message.
Voice-mail audio
In the message that was played today in Garcia’s trial in Monroe County Court, Garcia apparently referred to his firing the day before over an allegation by certified nursing assistant Mary Silliman that he had sexually accosted her, as well as a previous firing from another health care facility after another woman made a similar allegation.
At the time of the call, Silliman lay dead of two gunshot wounds to the head in the parking lot at Lakeside. Within eight hours, the other woman who had complained about Garcia would also be shot to death with her husband in their Canandaigua home.
“This is Frank. I’m sorry to let you down, but at Lakeside I really lost it,” Garcia allegedly told his professor, Linda M. Janelli, in the phone message.
“Another girl said I raped her there and everything. I had to take care of business and I am really sorry. You have been a great professor and somebody good to listen to. Thank you very much. Bye.”
Janelli’s office phone received the call at 5:46 a.m. Feb. 14, according to a university phone system time log. The call was made less than an hour after the Brockport shootings.
Janelli testified that she recognized Garcia’s voice on the recording because she spoke to him at least once a week since he began taking graduate courses in gerontology at Nazareth in January 2008. Garcia, a registered nurse, was studying to be a nurse practitioner.
The professor said she first heard the message Feb. 15 when she accessed her voice-mail messages while on a trip to New Jersey. She notified Nazareth security, which contacted the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office. An investigator made a copy of the message on a hand-held digital recorder.
Jurors heard the recording twice. Judge Frank P. Geraci Jr. allowed the District Attorney’s Office to release a copy to the news media because the recording was entered into evidence, but he ruled that a transcript of the call was given to jurors as an aid and couldn’t be released because it’s not in evidence.
Garcia, 35, of Hamlin is charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Silliman, 23, and Randal Norman, 41, and attempted first-degree murder in the wounding of Audra Dillon, 42.
The prosecution said Garcia confronted Silliman outside the hospital while she was on a cigarette break. Dillon testified this week that she and Norman were shot when they saw a man struggling with a woman and stopped to help her. She said she could identify Garcia as the shooter from his “very intense eyes.”
Garcia was convicted in August in Ontario County of first-degree murder in the slayings of Christopher Glatz, 44, and his wife, Kimberly Glatz, 38, who were shot in their home after the Brockport shootings. Garcia was ordered to prison for life without the possibility of parole.
Prosecutors said Garcia was seeking revenge on Silliman and Kimberly Glatz over their roles in his firings.
